“I do,” Samantha said as she placed her small hand against the side of his face. “I’m familiar with the feel of the poison in both of you. I should be able to judge any change in it.”
It wasn’t long before she reluctantly withdrew the hand.
“Well?” Kahlan asked when Samantha didn’t say anything.
The young woman’s dark eyes looked up. “I’m sorry, Mother Confessor, but it’s worse than I’ve ever felt before.”
For the first time, Kahlan had the feeling, the real, fully realized feeling, that Richard was dying. He was slipping away from her and there was nothing she could do about it. Against her best efforts, she imagined Richard dying, and what a dead world it would be without him.
She swallowed and gripped the sword tighter.
When she heard the distant call of a mockingbird, she recognized it as a signal from men of the First File. The wizard’s fire had killed all that it was going to kill. That meant that the rest of the Shun-tuk they would face would be the ones with some degree of occult powers—powers that Kahlan and the rest of those with her knew nothing about. There was no telling what they were capable of, except she knew they could raise the dead, and that was certainly trouble enough.
Powers or no powers, though, they would bleed. It was up to the soldiers, now, to be the steel to protect them, to protect their Lord Rahl. Now was the time the threat had to be ended.
Kahlan looked down at Samantha. “Take the reins.”
“What?”
“Take the reins. We don’t have a lot of men. Every sword counts.” She lifted the point of the Sword of Truth, its power thundering through her. “I have to help the men. You need to lead the horse, now.”
Despite the fear in her eyes, Samantha nodded. “I understand.”
Kahlan spotted Nicci weaving her way up through the soldiers to get Kahlan. The sorceress’s beautiful features were set with grim determination.
“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s time to end this.”
This time, it was Kahlan who pushed out in front of Nicci, taking the lead.
The time had come at last for her sword to taste all the Shun-tuk blood it could ever want.
Both Kahlan and the sword were eager for the fight.
CHAPTER
24
They didn’t have to go far before they encountered the soldiers. They had been slowing, hanging back a bit, trying to create a gap in case those with Richard had to take him and run for their lives. The men were trying to create a head start for the others if it ended up being a last-stand fight to the death. As Kahlan and Nicci squeezed between the men, headed back down the gorge, Nicci cast a small spark of flame out in front to provide enough light so they could get their footing, but it was only enough to light up a short distance ahead of them.
She knew that they had outpaced the Shun-tuk and been able to give themselves at least a slight lead, but the soldiers had now given back some of that gap to insulate Richard. Kahlan didn’t know how far they would need to go before they encountered the enemy.
When Nicci finally cast out a larger flame to drift higher up and out ahead of them, and it lit the entire scene beyond, Kahlan’s blood went cold.
“Dear spirits,” she whispered.
Beyond the dark figures of their own men in their chain mail and dark leather armor, all down the gorge was what looked like an endless sea of white figures snaking up the chasm. There were so many that Kahlan couldn’t see the far end of the serpent.
After all the Shun-tuk had entered the gorge, Sergeant Remkin was supposed to close them off from behind. Those men were supposed to be the hammer that would smash the Shun-tuk against Commander Fister’s anvil. Since she couldn’t see the end, she had no way of knowing if Remkin had been able to shut the back door.
Kahlan quickly recognized that there were a great deal more of the enemy than she had expected to see. She had expected vast numbers to have been vaporized by the wizard’s fire and Nicci’s power. Despite how many had died, there were more than ample Shun-tuk left to do the job they had been sent to do.
When they had been back in the encampment they had no way of knowing the numbers of the Shun-tuk scattered out beyond in the woods. She remembered the way they kept coming, but she now realized that they had been seeing only a limited view. She never realized how many more there were back in those woods.
She didn’t think that Commander Fister or any of the rest of them expected that there might be this many. These weren’t merely spirit trackers; this was an army. It was apparent that when Sulachan and Hannis Arc sent men to accomplish a task, they sent enough to make sure they could not possibly fail.
She now knew something important about both of them: they were never careless. They planned carefully and then deployed overwhelming, withering, brute force to accomplish what they were after. Neither employed subtlety—they were dedicated to applying overpowering might to crush any opposition.